Showing 1 - 10 of 174
Are fluctuations in firms' profitability risk a major cause of regular business cycles? We study this question within … such a model, surprise increases of risk lead to a wait-and-see policy for investment at the firm level and a decrease in … the size of firm-level risk fluctuations. We find that time-varying firm-level risk on its own is unlikely to be a major …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012461796
Uncertainty appears to jump up after major shocks like the Cuban Missile crisis, the assassination of JFK, the OPEC I oil-price shock and the 9/11 terrorist attack. This paper offers a structural framework to analyze the impact of these uncertainty shocks. I build a model with a time varying...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012465265
We provide evidence on the relationship between aggregate uncertainty and the macroeconomy. Identifying uncertainty shocks using methods from the news shocks literature, the analysis finds that innovations in realized stock market volatility are robustly followed by contractions, while shocks to...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012453915
The extraordinary events surrounding the Great Recession have cast a considerable doubt on the traditional sources of macroeconomic instability. In their place, economists have singled out financial and uncertainty shocks as potentially important drivers of economic fluctuations. Empirically...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012456616
This paper examines the macroeconomic dynamics of the 2007-09 recession in the United States and the subsequent slow recovery. Using a dynamic factor model with 200 variables, we reach three main conclusions. First, although many of the events of the 2007-2009 collapse were unprecedented, their...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012460565
This review article tries to answer four questions: (i) what are the stylized facts about uncertainty over time; (ii) why does uncertainty vary; (iii) do fluctuations in uncertainty matter; and (iv) did higher uncertainty worsen the Great Recession of 2007-2009? On the first question both macro...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012458949
In lower-income countries, the economic contractions that accompany lockdowns to contain the spread of COVID-19 can increase child mortality, counteracting the mortality reductions achieved by the lockdown. To formalize and quantify this effect, we build a macro-susceptible-infected-recovered...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012585409
This paper proposes that idiosyncratic firm-level fluctuations can explain an important part of aggregate shocks, and provide a microfoundation for aggregate productivity shocks. Existing research has focused on using aggregate shocks to explain business cycles, arguing that individual firm...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012463365
Notwithstanding its impressive contributions to empirical financial economics, there remains a significant gap in the volatility literature, namely its relative neglect of the connection between macroeconomic fundamentals and asset return volatility. We progress by analyzing a broad...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012464380
Safe assets play a critical role in an(y) economy. A "safe asset" is an asset that is (almost always) valued at face value without expensive and prolonged analysis. That is, by design there is no benefit to producing (private) information about its value. And this is common knowledge....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012456465